How we are amusing ourselves at present:

Simulated Zombie Attack

Enhanced Simulated Zombie Attack

Piracy Responsible for Decline of Christian Music Sales

If These Are Rabbits Then I'm a Crayfish

MultiBabel of the Side of Each Expression Produces a Poetry

Candidates for Mayor of San Francisco Take the Voight-Kampff Test

Are We Living In a Matrix-style Computer Simulation?

Eat, Grannie, Eat! Think of the Carats!

The Japanese Understand Coffee

Yet Another Desperate Attempt to Make Corporate Executives Fun to Be With And/Or Competent

What? You want me to actually write something? Who are you, the Creative Self-Expression Police?

Here's how you live an unexamined life: go looking for yourself. You want to examine something? Examine this *gives Spanish gesture of contempt*. Anyone who examines their life with any honesty will quickly move on to equally fruitless things.

The unexamined life is not worth examining.


On another note altogether: what is wrong with having no ambition? Ambition is vastly overrated. Do I really want to sprint to my own grave with my eyes shut?

Fair and Balanced

FoxNews is suing satirist Al Franken to prevent him using the slogan "Fair and Balanced" as a subtitle to his new book, apparently because they don't want people assuming Franken is connected with the channel, "Fair and Balanced" being a description that people automatically associate with FoxNews.

Wow, can you make coffee come out of your nose like that all the time?

Anyway, the usual suspects have called for a cyber protest of leviathan dimensions, and as we at Quotidian Hell are nothing if not joiners, what can we do but play our small part?

Given that a mass website usage of "Fair and Balanced" will help stymie FoxNew's attempt to retain proprietary control of the phrase, as a service to those redoubtable newshounds and their quest to make our world a better America, I suggest the following alternatives, all of which I'm sure are public domain.

FoxNews: The Magic Kingdom

FoxNews: Resistance is futile

FoxNews: Roachs check in, they don't check out

FoxNews: Because life's complicated enough

FoxNews: I can't believe I ate the whole thing!

FoxNews: Ugly is only skin-deep

FoxNews: It's everywhere you want to be

FoxNews: It never varies

FoxNews: Corn and cluck for a buck

FoxNews: Enter a different World

FoxNews: I'd rather have a bowl of Coco Pops

FoxNews: If I've only one life, let me live it as a blonde!

That oughta hold 'em.


So, I'm going to be away for three weeks (don't sneer, you'll notice) so this place will likely be reverting to "howling wasteland" mode given the enervated anomie of my fellow hellions. But you never know, maybe you'll get lucky and our erudite colleague will explain his formula for successfully living an unexamined life. Play nice now!

More fun with food.

Strawberry Pop-Tart Blow-Torches

Did you say sausage bending? Again, was it sausage bending, you said?

The difference between these recipes and four star cuisine is simply the quality of the ingredients. Otherwise, it's all playing with food. High cuisine and sausage bending alike is an exercise in putting fingerprints all over the food.

OK. I think that's more than enough time for that last joke.

More funny stuff here, courtesy of me finding a new link that works.
Ah yes, a man-pleasing appetizer. "Yeah, baby - you know how I like it when you put leaf in my beer!"

And while we're talking food related humour, you could also try Candyboots 1974 Weightwatchers Cards. Or just make yourself a sandwich, stand back, and laugh. Laugh, I say - laugh like the wind!

What the hell - while I'm here: these people are funny*. So's this guy. Here's a weblog by some dude from the first mob (or "some bodacious dude" as I believe he's known to his mum).

* Well, they were. Here's what's left.

I am writing a short article on the beauty of abandoned websites.

From the site:

In terms of my possible candidacy, let me sum up what we face in the following quote from a right wing journalist recently appearing on CNN with Wolf Blitzer:

“Voter turnout is not a glorious thing. If Jerry Springer shows up, he’ll bring all these new people to the polls. They will be slack-jawed yokels, hicks, weirdos, pervs, and whatnot.”

I say: if these people can become U.S. presidents, why not bring them to the polling booths as well?

Sheesh - for a second there things were getting a little crowded. Nice and quiet now, 'though.

So - while you're here, pop across to Jerry Springer campaign headquarters and encourage the great man to make the U.S. Senate even more of a laughing stock. Or, at least, to try.

Was that a Haiku, Andy? Hi there - anyone here from out of town? Welcome me - lift the apron and cop a feel - the Grand Master is here.

Thanks for spoiling that for me, Bryce, now's there no reason for me to see the film.

No sarcasm there, by the way - I mean, really, thank you.

Here's a fun idea: rig your XBox so that it gives you electrical shocks when you lose. I don't think they're taking this as far as I want to see it go. How about a games console that fires metal spikes at you out of the screen? How about the sales clerk just shoots you in the head when you ask to buy one? I'm just thinking about the gene pool here, people, help me out already.

And, for no reason at all, the fifty worst places to live in the UK.

I'll tell you what else was painful yet inevitable: the extraordinarily long time it took for Madonna to finally join a cult and start preaching to us about the evils of materialism. We waited with clenched teeth and buttocks for this one for twenty years. At last - she's done it.

i tell you what was painful
the amount of time that elapsed in "Goldmember"
between learning that one of the bad guys was called "Roboto"
and Dr evil making the inevitable greeting:
"domo arigato
Mr Roboto"

I could see that one coming a mile off in the snow. Fortunately my friends didnt know enough
about bad 80's rock (was it Styx?) to suffer as i did. I was muttering "o my god" for what felt like a lifetime as
the punch line approached...

I make this entry not because I wish to, but because I can. It's amazing the information that springs to the forefront of one's consciousness.
Examples: It just occurred to me that as a young lad I thought 'Shachihata' and 'Matsushita' were pretty nifty Japanese words..and what is xylene, anyway?

I sit at my desk
Listlessly cruising the Net
Please remove my brain


Q.How can you identify a postmodern blog site?

A. It contains nothing but links. There may of course be essays on the nature of links, but these will be composed of nothing but links.

Why am I never bored? Simply it is because I find boredom... boring.

In line with my colleague's attempt to raise the intellectual tone around here with bleak, soul-sapping aphorisms, here is a report on my three-day weekend, composed entirely in haikus:

Chatty busdriver
amuses English tourists
who don't know better.

Dreary Saturday.
Hang my sheets and towels to dry.
What an achievement.

At barbecue with
married friends with kids and lives.
Get me a beer NOW.

Damn monsteria -
its fronds obstruct my washing.
I'll rip your leaves off.

Actually I had a fine, sober time at the BBQ, but thought I'd affect a mood of enervated desperation for comic effect. Not that that's any of your business, disinterested voyeur of others' anguish that you are.

The true existentialists are the ones who refuse to do any art. You won't find them exploring their fate.

Indeed. Hence, as a corollary: "People who try to enjoy long, healthy lives are just procrastinating."

But then - "If you don't like this planet, why don't you leave?"

And, of course, "I complained that I had no shoes and then I met a man who had no feet, which made it worse because that tosser didn't even need shoes!"

See y'all after we celebrate our Queen not being dead yet, by taking a day off work. Why, thank ye, y'majesty, that be right sportin'.

Why not commit suicide? Because it would involve a certain amount of effort.

I will be disappointed if anyone ever visits or reads Quotidian Hell. Let it be a futile howling into the void. Only that which is worthless has any value.

From the ever-lovin' people at GromBlog (see June 5), the site of a guy in NZ who is building a cruise missile from bits he intends to buy on ebay.

Sometimes you find yourself wondering if your world-view is a little askew. And then you read something like this:

Washington DC, May 21, 2003 - The Central Intelligence Agency classified and withheld from a Freedom of Information Act release a 25-year-old joke item in a weekly terrorism report about the terrorist threat to Santa Claus and the North Pole, among many other examples of "dubious secrets" published today on the Web by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

The joke item was:

Target: GONP Courier Flight Place: Unspecified Date:24-25 December 1974

A new organization of uncertain make-up, using the name "Group of the Martyr Ebenezer Scrooge," plans to sabotage the annual courier flight of the Government of the North Pole. Prime Minister and Chief Courier S. Claus has been notified and security precautions are being coordinated worldwide by the CCCT working Group. (CONFIDENTIAL)

You can access the pdf file here (see page 5), details of its FOI history here. [Found via: PRWatch's Spin of the Day for May 21 2003.]

Oh - ...and realise it isn't.

Two ideas which are going to make me richer than Gates (you're on your honour not to nick them):

caffeinated soup

a computer that can feel pain.

That is all.